As most marketers will agree, the first port of call for online reputation management (“ORM”) is to bury negative information deep in search results. This is has become ever more pertinent in the face of increasing client discernment.
As a result, 90% or even more clients are willing to adopt ORM. Another growing trend in our contemporary world of interconnectedness is the act of thorough research. This is an unavoidable fact. You can be assured that most clients will undertake some form of online due diligence on you (i.e. run your name through a search engine and click on every relevant link that they can find) before engaging in any business or committing to any undertaking.
The reality is that even the most successful of people will have some kind of bad rep. Their success nonetheless, is more a function of their ability to manage a bad rep, than their ability to never accumulate one in the first place. An unmanaged negative reputation can hinder your success and directly impact your revenue potential. Now, let’s deep dive into three simple, yet very effective SEO and SMM techniques you can use to fix your online reputation:
Own That Listing
Before publishing a post about your business, make sure to publish your listings on a high authority website, such as Wikipedia – Seems like a good idea…
The flipside: A domain with higher authority will certainly boost your name at the top of everyone’s search, allowing people to access it easily. However, an alteration of search engine results is possible and could cause your plan backfire.
Takeaway: Maintain control of the official content that you are pushing online.
Keyword Consistency
From a Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”) perspective, keyword consistency is one of the most important factors to consider when publishing an article. Whereas, from the perspective of reliability and online reputation management, the focus is on keywords that produce maximum search results. When people are searching for a negative keyword while looking for your website (take consultation from webmaster about such keywords), you can use those keywords but in different variations.
Spread Out Your Efforts
Last but not least, this technique is quite simple and is concerned with leveraging domains. The basic rule of thumb is – high profile publications should lead to your website, low-quality domains should lead to your social media profiles. Effectively presenting your brand on a single website, can draw multiple search engine results from that single website. However, people are increasingly searching further down the search result ranking.
The Take-Out
Even if you have search links you want to hide you can at least make sure the results that come up first, are the ones you are proud of. Your positive brand perception plays a big role in influencing your customer’s decision. If you want to achieve your business goals – start employing the above-presented techniques and set your brand on the path to gaining more and more trust.
There are various other SEO strategies that can be applied in reputation management to build or enhance your online presence while pushing negative content to the back pages of Google where no one will find it.
